Today at Techno-Frontier 2011, the Tokyo University of Science demonstrates their latest achievement with the world first rare-earth-free electric motor of reluctance motor for Hybrid Electric Vehicle.
Nowadays, all electric vehicles features IPMSM of Interior Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors are heavily relies on rare-earth material that in essence are rather rare and becoming more expensive to obtain and threatened by some countries monopolistic attitude.
To this affect the Tokyo University of Science in collaboration with the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Hokkaido University deiced to build their very own rare-earth-free electric motor made to be as efficient and powerful as Toyota’s 2nd generation of Electric motors.
After many years of development and research, the Tokyo University of Science has almost achieve its goal and offer now a Electric Motor as compact as the one of a Prius 2nd generation Motor and almost as powerful with a total power output exceed the one of the Prius with 70kW compare to the 50kW of the Prius and a torque of 373Nm slightly lower that the 400Nm available on the Toyota’s Electric Motor.

Still, the Tokyo University of Science is really confident that it will succeed to overpass Toyota’s Prius 2nd generation Electric Engine in the very near future and provide a cheaper, easier to build a rare-earth-free electric motor.
So far, and according to the Associate Professor Nobukazu Hoshi, they also have to fix some technical issues related to noise and vibration before being capable to market their rare-earth-free Electric Motor.